Italian poet who celebrated homosexual love, particularly pederasty, with lyrical elegance. Usually written in the form of epigrams, his moody poems often feature the tranquil, homoerotic imagery of young boys at play.

In 1925 Penna graduated from the Technical Institute of Perugia. After working as a clerk in a Milan bookstore, he moved to Rome in 1929 and began submitting his poetry to literary journals. His first collection of verse, Poesie (“Poetry”), was published in 1938 and later enlarged, first in 1957 and then in 1970 under the title Tutte le poesie (“All the Poetry”). His early verse, influenced by the Italian poets Umberto Saba (Saba, Umberto) and Eugenio Montale (Montale, Eugenio), borrowed from the school of Hermeticism.

Much of Penna's verse published after the first enlargement of Poesie was collected in Stranezze (1976; “Oddities”), a book that won him the Bagutta Prize for poetry only a week before his death. His other works of poetry include Appunti (1950; “Notes”); Una strana gioia di vivere (1956; “A Strange Joy of Living”), which sparked interest in Penna's poetry; Croce e delizia (1958; “Suffering and Delight”); Il viaggiatore insonne (1977; “The Sleepless Traveler”), 13 of Penna's favourite and most beautiful poems; and Peccato di gola (1989; “The Sin of a Glutton”). English translations of his work include This Strange Joy (1982), a collection of poems that reflect Penna's unwavering delight in life despite adversity, and Confused Dream (1988), which is a partial translation of Confuso sogno (1980).